A couple of years after she’d started drawing it she sent one of her strips to the local paper, theAkersville Gazette. They published it and asked if she had another. (Yes, actually. A hundred, probably. And new ones coming to mind every day.)
Nowadays her strip was a staple of the weekly paper. She called itFamily Tree,in honor of Old Ashworthy, which was often pictured when a panel featured an outdoor scene. The pay was just twenty-five dollars a week. But it felt good to be working.
The truth was—and it felt almost dangerous saying this, when women her age were trying to rewrite the history of their housewife mothers, creating careers outside their homes—that for Eleanor the raising of their three children remained the primary focus of her life. Eleanor saw her days with her children as a kind of artwork, and as with the practice of making art, much that you attempted didn’t work out. Still, the act of doing it felt as demanding and precious as the creation of any book.
In her occasional conversations with Patty—off in New York in her Diane von Furstenberg dresses and heels, complaining that whatever man she was seeing at the time distracted her from her career—Eleanor’s life looked hopelessly outdated and out of step with the times. She didn’t mind.
She and Cam were old-fashioned parents, who still sang grace before the start of every meal and went for walks to the waterfall rather than to the mall. They had decided that there would never be a Nintendo at their house. She wanted to portray, in her drawings, the picture of a family that had somehow managed to hold on to a simple, uncomplicated way of life in a fast-moving world.
They baked pies and glued doilies onto construction paper for valentines and caught fireflies. They made cork people. But the couple in her strip struggled with their relationship, too. In the course of supporting their children’s hopes and dreams, they frequently wondered what had become of their own.
Eleanor liked to think of herself as putting a frame around the events of her day in such a way that they took on a kind of significance they might not otherwise have possessed. Setting down her stories within the five frames of a weekly comic strip allowed Eleanor to take a few steps away from her life. She could make a series of panels about something as small as the despair she had felt when her daughter rubbed a chicken pox scab off her scalp, knowing that she would have a bald spot there forever—or her husband’s choice of a new toaster for her birthday present the year she turned thirty, or the day her son’s beloved cowboy hat had been lifted from his head by a gust of wind as they stood at the edge of the waterfall and plunged into the water—and her own anguish at his grief. Every time she memorialized these moments, large and small, by drawing the characters and putting the words they spoke in bubbles over their heads, she was able to locate the larger meaning in what she had chosen to do with her life.
One week she drew a series of panels featuring the character of the mother, Maggie, on the couch in a living room whose yard sale furnishings and braided rug looked a lot like the ones in their own living room—reading a book to the younger daughter, Jessie. The book Maggie was holding, in the drawing, happened to be one Eleanor had once read to Ursula—a story calledThe Dead Bird.
The cartoon child, Jessie, who sucked her thumb, just as Ursula did, asked Maggie where her own parents were.
“They died,” she said. Like Ursula, when she’d put the same question to Eleanor, Jessie had been quiet, taking this in.
“Are you going to die sometime?” the child asked her mother.
“Not for a long time, honey.”
Then the hardest part: “Am I going to die someday?”
In the final panel, the Maggie character just sat there, pondering her child’s question. Sometimes there were no good answers.
“We’re outnumbered now,” Cam had said, laughing, after the birth of their son.
Eleanor had loved this—loved the way their family, unlike the quietly lonely one in which she was raised, was loud and boisterousand always a little chaotic. She knew, from observing the way Cam’s parents greeted their son, and even their grandchildren, on their annual Christmas visit, and again, when they pulled down the driveway every August in Roger’s Lincoln Town Car—with clubs in the back for Roger’s annual game of golf with his son, and matching sweaters for each of the children, and the same observations every year (“Look how you’ve grown” and “How’s school?”)—that the home in which her husband was raised must have been similarly lacking in warmth.
This was what Eleanor had wanted for her life: the constant whirl of activity, the small warm bodies tumbling into her lap, the jumble of shoes by the screen door, which swung open and closed all day long, as the children headed in and out, the chorus of their sweet, high voices calling out. (And then Toby’s, that had been surprisingly deep almost from the beginning. He never seemed like a baby. More like a very small man.) The three of them piling into the bed after their baths, the smell of baby shampoo, Ursula flinging her arms around Eleanor’s neck, Alison (the one who hung back) smoothing her brother’s wet curls, Toby twirling his ribbon in his ear, his small foot (the one with the webbed toes) stroking her own. Why did people think having a tidy home, or a quiet one, was such a great thing? To Eleanor, the sound of her family’s voices was music. Even when they drowned out her own. Even when they drowned out her husband’s.
She saw the two of them—herself and Cam—like two white-water rafters, off on class 5 waters. You didn’t have time to debate your choices or question them once they were made. There was no space to think or even worry. You held on tight, paddled hard, and surrendered to the experience, hoping you’d make it to the spot, wherever it was, where you brought your craft into shore. But your heart beat so hard you thought your chest might explode. First you got wet. First the water swirled around you, tipped you over, or came close. You never knew if you’d make it, but you couldn’t stop.
Eleanor was too consumed with children and work to consider her goals in life. (It continued to amaze Eleanor the way her friend Darla—even in the middle of a messed-up marriage—never lost sight of hers. She still spoke regularly about leaving Bobby, saving up fora deposit on a place of her own for her and Kimmie, and signing up for undertaker school, where all Eleanor could think of was getting through the day.)
Somebody always needed her. Food, bathroom, shoelaces, lost toys, Barbies, rocks, Band-Aids, unwanted dresses, volcano dioramas, insects, Legos, popcorn, sorrow. Joy again.
Come look. Come play.An event was not wholly real in her children’s lives unless they’d told her about it, unless she’d borne witness.
She knew every inch of their bodies, but seldom gave thought to her own. And though she knew this was not how women should live their lives—devoting themselves solely to the care of babies and children, and particularly the women of her generation, who had challenged the old definition of a woman’s role—she harbored an almost guilty pleasure concerning her love of caring for her children, to the exclusion—or the vast compromise, anyway—of her own sidelined dream of making art. And to the detriment of her marriage, probably.
These were not stories Eleanor explored in herFamily Treestrip. She barely explored them in her own mind. Long ago, Eleanor had promised herself she’d never let a son or daughter of hers feel excluded the way she had. Instead, maybe, the one she relegated to last place was her husband. Somewhere along the way, she was losing sight of him. He was losing sight of her, too.
Maybe the problem went deeper than that. Maybe she had lost sight of herself.
24.
The Wieniawski Polonaise
From early on in their time together, Cam had told Eleanor that his brother, Roger Junior, was his parents’ favorite. To Eleanor, the idea of feeling greater love for one of your children over the others was unimaginable. But it may also have been true of Toby that he inspired a particular brand of wild love unlike anything she’d known. He was wild himself, so much so that one time, at the end of her rope, she put him in the borning room and stuck a broom through the door handle to keep him from breaking it down.
“I’m having quiet time,” she told him, as—through the door—he offered up that he’d be good from now on, for the rest of his life. He was weeping and so was she.
“I’ve reached my limit,” she told him, as—thirty seconds later—she let him out.
“Poor Mama,” he said, flinging his arms around her neck, licking the tears off her.
